Gameroom

Metatron’s VR Gameroom was conceived around a voxel table - if sitting in a highly pixelated VR world could be compelling even with conversation being the only aim, what could be put on that table to make the experience even more compelling? The answer was a part of all of our lives from an early age: A table deserves tabletop games. After a few fits and starts, Metatron finally embraced Unreal Engine 4 (while not neglecting Unity for further experimentation), and VR Chess was born.

Experiments

Virtual reality is not merely “video games plus head-mounted displays”, it's nothing short of an entirely new medium. Almost none of the rules are written, and unexplored frontiers stretch in every direction. This opportunity to discover what makes VR useful is a primary reason for the creation of Metatron, and drives our experimentation. While much of this experimental code will never see release, some modest portion of it feels significant enough to be of value to the wider VR development community, and we hope to present packaged versions of our proposed solutions to some common VR UI problems soon.

VR Speed Reader

An application for rapidly reading text documents in VR. Based on Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), VR Speed Reader presents words from a document in virtual space; this limits eye movement and discourages bad habits like subvocalization (reading the text in your head) and regression (re-reading portions already read). Compared to screen-based RSVP apps like Spritz and Spreeder, VR Speed Reader makes more effective use of peripheral vision to provide essential context, and uses head tracking to provide a simple user interface that can be used to configure the reading rate without interrupting reading.

Team Metatron is a collection of virtual reality enthusiasts turned virtual reality developers. Many of the members met on the MetaCraft server shortly after receiving our Kickstarted Oculus Rift development kits in 2013, and we were lucky enough to pull other talented members out of our weekly post-Cymatic Bruce stream meet-ups.

Even before the official inception of the team, we shared a vision of what virtual reality could become in our lifetimes - not just a platform for the most exciting video games ever devised, but a networked socialization space, a means of man-computer symbiosis that can expand human consciousness, a pervasive technology that can allow us to probe what reality itself truly is. In the short term, we see everyone who shares this vision as stewards of it, and we hope to do our part to achieve it through our various ongoing projects.